Quantification of segregation in southeastern Wisconsin as a marker for economic disadvantage

The degree of racial segregation in a region is an important environmental variable and influences a wide variety of different public health and social justice issues such as housing equity, economic prosperity, access to healthcare, and disease outcomes and disparities. Furthermore, it is now possible to take advantage of high resolution spatial data and advancements in computing power and analytical approaches to examine small area environmental factors and health outcomes.  However, many of the existing segregation metrics were designed to summarize segregation patterns over larger regions, such as metropolitan statistical areas; measures derived at this scale are of limited utility for examining local neighborhood health effects.  To address these concerns, this project alters previous segregation indices and defines novel ones in order to quantify segregation at the local level, as compared to the greater region of interest. The indices are tested for their ability to serve as predictors of economic disadvantage in each neighborhood for the southeastern Wisconsin area.  Both ordinary least squares (R-squared: 0.7363, p < 0.001) and spatial regression (R-squared: 0.7781, p < 0.001) analyses demonstrate that these indices are significantly related to a measure of economic disadvantage.  This finding indicates that these measures of local segregation likely have predictive power for public health research questions. Proper local quantification of residential racial segregation in public health research will ultimately enable the targeting of local public health interventions.